I was pretty impressed with the Stop Forum Spam site – the guy spamming mine was on that list already. I guess the more sites use anti-spam databases, the harder it is for spammers to get their stuff out there.

The facebook app crashed my iPhone this morning. I was opening a friend’s photo album that they had posted… and the music started skipping and then it just hung.

I know Optus’s data connection isn’t the best, but that shouldn’t stop the whole phone from working. I think it’s a buggy app. It’s always telling me I have unread messages when I don’t and generally clunky.

Lucky for me I managed to guess the reset combination… press and hold both button simultaneously for about 10 seconds.

I’ve been thinking the last few days about the difference between the words “Sound” and “Audio”. In many respects, they are synonymous, and I’ve noticed that my usage is inconsistent.

For example: Am I a Sound Designer or Audio Designer?

Sometimes using one word over the other feels right because we often hear them combined with other words:

Audio Technology

Sound Effects

Sound Track (of a film)

Audio- visual

Then the difference came to me when thinking in plurals. You can have many sounds but not many audios. So audio is the general word, referring to the whole, and sound is the more specific word, referring to a specific instance of a noise.

Many banks are listed on the stock exchange – so what are their shares really worth?

Two ways of valuing a business are their assets and their income:

ASSET: A bank’s asset is the money they lend you. On your balance sheet, it’s a liability, on the bank’s balance sheet, it’s an asset. Paying off debt reduces a bank’s assets.

INCOME: A bank’s income is the interest they charge you on credit. On your profit and loss statement, interest charged from a loan is an expense; on their profit and loss statement, it’s income. Paying off debt reduces a bank’s income.

It seems that one of the major factors in the world’s current financial crisis is bad debt.

Let’s consider the possibility of people paying off their debts. Firstly, why would people want to pay off debt?

So you can eventually own your own home.

To reduce interest payments every month and free up cash flow

Gain financial independence

Prepare for retirement

Be a conservative investor without the risk of suffering from margin calls

and, I’m sure there are plenty of other good reasons, too…

Secondly, what would happen if people actually paid off their debts?

You would reasonably expect the banks to lose share value since the act of reducing debt reduces both asset and income for the bank.

So when you invest in bank shares, what are you really investing in? DEBT. Yet people believe that bank shares are a safe investment – safer than biotech, IT, mining or many other industries….

It seems that the D-Link DSL-G604T wireless router has serious problems with Bonjour.

I have just purchased a network printer, which is automatically discovered over the network using bonjour. This technology is really great.

The printer connects by ethernet. One computer connects by ethernet – it works fine. The other computer connects by wireless, and it doesn’t.

To make things more strange, the wireless computer can ping the printer. But it won’t discover it over bonjour. If I connect the second computer via an ethernet cable and turn off the wireless connection, then everything works perfectly.

I read a similar story on the whirlpool forums where that router had a problem with music sharing between wired and wireless computers, and apparently the problem was fixed by a firmware upgrade for the router.

Not so lucky for me. I downloaded the latest firmware, and the same problem still exists.

The story “Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end” in the Sydney Morning Herald shows two surveys where there are less than 10% of people who strongly agree or want the government to implement mandatory censorship of the internet.

So, technical feasability and civil liberties aside, what kind of a democracy do we have here?

I normally don’t follow election campaigns with too much detail, but Springborg’s campaign for the upcoming Queensland appears to me to be irresponsible and full of misinformation.

One of his ads Springborg appears and claims that he will “lower payroll tax to create jobs”. I’m no expert in tax, but taxation is a federal government department – so how can the Queensland election affect that!?

And then there is the series of ads: “Labor: Not good enough”. These are the perfect example of why I’ve hated political campaigns since I was a child. Who is this ad by? Who should I vote then?

I don’t think that Coca Cola would legally be able to make ads like this about Pepsi. So why do political parties do it?

I think political ads should always mention, not just in the disclaimer, who the ad is for. Instead of saying “Labor: not good enough” say “LNP: we’ll do it better”… then people can ask why and make an educated decision instead of being badgered by a negative and ambiguous campaign.